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Monthly Archives: April 2015

This weekend was the 60th anniversary of the polio vaccine, which removed the potentially deadly disease from the public consciousness of now three generations of children and parents in the US and most of the developed world. I thought this might be a good opportunity to explore the impact that the vaccine has had on childhood mortality worldwide, as well as play with some new features of Tableau Public 9.0 before I start training people on it next month.

I found data on polio fairly easily from the World Health Organization. Their data repository is quite comprehensive, but its format is kind of nasty. Not nasty like unstructured data can be, but its structure needs some work, like the removal of the empty row before the field headers (which isn’t so common in CSV files), and the fairly common use of time dimensions as if they were measures.

You’ve probably dealt with a lot of data sources like this:

Help! I’m not a columnar data store!

So, the way I used to solve this problem was by loading the data that I wanted into SQL Server (my “work husband”) and then writing a ton of union statements to transform it into a new fact table. There’s probably an easier way than this, but it’s what I know. And I’ve gotten fast at it.

But I was super excited to see Tableau’s new Transpose feature in the data engine because–as much as I love proving my nerdy skills by writing intro-level SQL–this new data engine feature might free me from such tasks. So, I loaded up the CSV into Tableau 9.0, and the pesky empty row that I thought I could delete with the new data prep tools (which are awesome) didn’t work on my file…because it isn’t Excel. So that was annoying–I had to open the file in Excel to remove the row anyway.

But! Pivoting the data made up for it. It’s actually very easy, as you can see in this video–I highlighted the fields that I wanted, which were ALL of the years, shown below…

Wait for it…

And then I right-clicked and select “Pivot”. Easy-peasy!

The fields pivoted automagically!

Right-clicking and renaming the fields is a good idea, too..

Once I got the data loaded, I set about developing a useful analysis. I was curious how the rate of polio vaccinations had changed over time, and then how it was related both to other vaccination rates and to childhood mortality. In 1988, the World Health Assembly created a new initiative to dramatically lower the rates of polio: the infection rate in 1988 was 350,000 cases in 125 countries (about 1/200 results in complete paralysis); in 2013, there were only 416 new cases, with almost half of them in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Nigeria. (You can read more about it here.)

Those numbers speak for themselves, so I didn’t visualize them, but I did want to create a viz that allowed you to click on a country and to see the top three causes of mortality in children under five years old, as well as the change in childhood mortality and vaccination rates since 1988, which necessitated a table calculation. I love table calculations–we teach them from almost the beginning of our Tableau Desktop curriculum, because they’re incredibly useful. So, I set about adding some nice and simple ranking functions…I often customize table calculations, usually to show the percent difference from the average, so when I set about customizing a table calculation, the “Customize” button was not there…I could only edit the calc in the shelf, which is not very useful: shelf widths are limited to about 200px, and I actually really like the calculated field editing box–its new design is great. Why can’t we right-click on a table calc to customize it?)

And it’s entirely possible that I missed something during the Tableau 9.0 Roadshow that showed me how to do this more effectively. Which is a good segway back to polio…

Since polio is communicated from person to person through contaminated food or water, I added in some addition data points from the most recent set of World Bank Indicators, which I transformed using the aforementioned SQL unioning technique last year. It’s a highly informative data set, and Tableau ships a version of it, but I prefer to get to the native state, if possible, and since the other data sets in use are aggregated at the Country-Year-Metric level, blending them is very efficient.

Here’s what the dashboard looks like when you click on Afghanistan: it’s ranked #176, out of about 180 countries, with 71% of one-year-old children receiving the polio vaccine. What’s a little bit more shocking is that in a country where the US has “invested” billions of dollars, the healthcare spend per capita is only $51. That’s not much. In Norway, it’s, like, $10K. (Now that you know where Afghanistan is, go to this dashboard and click on it.) Oh, and 29% of the country has access to clean water. (Check out Rory Stewart’s documentation of life in rural Afghanistan if you want a really good feel for what things are like there.)

The trend lines for vaccination rates versus early childhood mortality in Afghanistan don’t look like they do for other countries, either: most countries keep making progress once they start. And fortunately, most countries aren’t overtaken by repressive regimes like the Taliban, which most likely accounts for the fluctuation in vaccination rates in the late 80’s and early 90’s. After their defeat in 2001/2002, it’s good to see that polio vaccination rates went from about 25% back up to 70%, which is almost a 300% increase.

How’s your geography?

Other good news for Afghanistan: the childhood mortality rate has decreased about 50% since the polio initiative started in 1988, but it’s just one of many factors, which we’ll discuss more in upcoming blog posts. One in ten Afghan children don’t make it to the age of five, which is still shockingly high, but it’s better than one in five.

Check out the dashboard, shown below.

Personal note: my high school Latin teacher, who introduced me to Greek and Monte Python, has struggled valiantly for many years with the recurrence of polio that he contracted as a child. I really admire him, and I hope that raising awareness of the impact that a single vaccine can have will help prevent children from suffering unnecessarily.

And thanks to my mother for cultivating in her children an appreciation of our luxurious lives through literary exploration of other cultures.